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In a startling revelation, the 13-year-old French schoolgirl who claimed that her teacher Samuel Paty had made Islamophobic remarks has admitted to having lied and made-up the story in order to avoid her father’s anger over being suspended from school.

The girl had initially claimed that Paty, in a class on the Freedom of Expression had asked her and other Muslim students to leave the room and was about to show them Charlie Hebdo’s controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. She had claimed that she was then suspended from school for two days after accusing the teacher of Islamophobia.

However, the girl has now admitted that she did not witness any Islamophobic act and was not even in class on October 6th when the alleged incident happened. She had already been suspended a day before due to repeated absence from school and then cooked up the story so as to not disappoint or anger her father.

She had heard about the incident from a friend, who said that Paty had not asked anyone to leave but suggested that anyone who thought they might be offended could close their eyes, before showing them a depiction of Mohammad, just like he had done in similar lessons on Free Speech previously.

The consequence of this 13-year old’s lies however costed teacher Samuel Paty with his life. Soon after getting to know of the ‘story’, the girl’s father Brahim Chnina and prominent radical Islamist Abdelhakim Sefrioui who have now been charged with complicity to murder, launched an online hate-campaign against Paty in which they also leaked his details which led to him being beheaded in a brutal terrorist attack in Paris.

According to the girl, she saw herself as the spokesperson of the pupils in the class and wanted to impress her father. “A spokesperson of what? Of lies, events that never happened? This rather makes me angry because the facts are serious, they’re tragic”, Paty’s family lawyer Le Roy said.

“If I had not said that to my father, none of this would have happened and it would not have spread so fast,” the student told the anti-terrorism judge. Her lawyer, however, insisted that the student should not carry the blame for Paty’s murder.

“It is the excessive behavior of the father who recorded and posted a video blaming the teacher that lead to this chain of events. My client lied, but even if it were true, the reaction of her father would have been equally disproportionate.”

Mbeko Tabula, the student's lawyer

“I regret the scale of the damage,” Chnina has said, saying he regretted not checking his daughter’s version of what happened. In the videos shared online, he had asked that Paty be murdered, following which he was beheaded last October by an 18-year-old Muslim from Russia who was motivated by the campaign. The killer was shot dead by the Police.